Cortical potentials as predictors of outcomes with adult cochlear implant recipients - preliminary findings

A proportion of adult cochlear implant recipients report an inability to use the signal from their cochlear implant effectively at varying post-operative intervals following cochlear implantation. Some of these recipients report deterioration in their ability to use the implant signal and do not benefit from map optimization. Others never attain the level of outcome that they had expected. Speech perception, functional listening in certain circumstances and EABR may demonstrate high performance with the cochlear implant. However recipients report extreme difficulty in noise and distortion of the signal with the cochlear implant. Commonly, environmental sounds overshadow speech. Cortical evoked potentials were measured in a group of recipients who had been reporting such difficulties. They revealed potential processing abnormalities at the level of the cortex in some of these cases. This paper will review the five result profiles that were obtained based on pre-operative, intra-operative and post-operative outcomes. It will begin to explore the value of predictive factors that may indicate the difficulties these recipients would experience post-operatively. Further, management strategies to evaluate and assist in optimizing performance will be addressed.